Three-time defending Tour de France champion Chris Froome failed a doping test at the Vuelta a España this September and is facing a potential year-long suspension from cycling, as the Guardian first reported today. Froome, the most dominant cyclist of the past decade and the winner of four Tours and one Vuelta,…

I have some personal news I’d like to share: I’m doping. With performance-enhancing drugs, even. The same kind that got tennis star Maria Sharapova banned from the professional tour for 15 months, and the reason she needs tournaments like the US Open—which starts today in New York—to offer her wildcard entries so she…

Ready yourself for takes: the U.S. Tennis Association has granted Maria Sharapova a wild card into the U.S. Open main draw, meaning she will play her first Grand Slam since he return from a 15-month ban for use of the substance meldonium, a heart disease medication said to improve recovery. In general, wild cards are…

The former world No. 5 from Italy, Sara Errani, was banned from tennis for two months after she tested positive for the cancer drug letrozole, a drug that can be used to “increase lean body mass,” the International Tennis Federation said today.

When Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson faced off in the 100-meter finals at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the race to determine the world’s fastest human was the marquee event of the Games. It was America vs. Canada; the lithe Lewis against the hulking Johnson; the reigning Olympic champ against the reigning world champ; Lewis’s…

Over the weekend, Italian officials popped a 53-year-old masters rider for racing with a hidden motor in his bicycle. Race organizers got a tip that the third-place rider at a race in Brescia on Saturday had been cheating and when they scanned his bike, they saw what looked like “a fire” in the seat tube and the rider…

Read one particular way, the history of cycling is a history of riders doing all they can to stretch past the natural limits of the human body. Cheating has been at the very heart of cycling since its inception and riders have tried, at various points throughout the sport’s history, strychnine, EPO, cocaine, wine,…

Dathan Ritzenhein has been one of the United States’ best distance runners for over a decade. He participated in the Athens, Beijing, and London Olympics, and once held the American 5k record. Ritzenhein was sponsored by Nike for his entire career until March, and lived in Oregon to train under Alberto Salazar with…

Maria Sharapova is set to return to competition on Wednesday at the Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart after receiving a wild card entry to the tournament. It will be her first tournament since she was banned from tennis for 15 months after testing positive for a banned substance last January. While the manner of her…

Following a two-year ban for doping, which was reduced to 15 months on appeal, Maria Sharapova is set to return to competition next week after she received a wild-card entry in Stuttgart. She was also given wild cards to Madrid and Rome. A handful of prominent players have questioned Sharapova receiving wild cards,…

A report from German broadcast network ARD—which previously broadcast bombshells about FIFA corruption in Qatar and unpunished doping activity—claims that the IOC covered up doping cases from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. German journalist Hajo Seppelt reports that “in 2016 during the re-analysis for banned substances,…

Team Sky is struggling. The Murdoch-funded cycling behemoth has won three of the past four Tours de France and will probably win this year’s edition of the race as well. The team has started this season well, with Colombian pipsqueak Sergio Henao winning an all-time Paris Nice by two seconds and do-it-all Polish star…

Team Sky are one of the richest and most successful cycling teams in the world, and they’ve billed themselves as a completely clean cycling team—everybody on the team has to sign an agreement that they’ve never been involved in doping—the sort of squad that shows that riders can win without doping. Sky riders have…

England’s The Sunday Timesreports that they have seen a document prepared by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) detailing use of the legal amino acid L-carnitine in “sometimes potentially unlawful” ways by British Olympian Mo Farah and six American members of the Nike Oregon Project—under the direction of…

It begins with the cyclists, of course. Just before the 1998 Tour de France, a Belgian trainer named Willy Voet was arrested while crossing the border into France because his car was filled with a tremendous amount of performance-enhancing drugs. The subsequent investigation (which became known as the Festina Affair)…